The post-mortems on the political journalism and political science APSA panel have been pouring forth like the body count in The Expendables.  There's one thread in particulat that has piqued my interest, however.  It starts with this Rob Farley observation: 

By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms.  I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research.  IPE might be an exception to this.  The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

To which, Matthew Yglesias responds:

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

To which, William Winecoff responds with, er, some urgency:

There are all kinds of problems with this. To begin with, [Yglesias] basically starts by admitting that journalists really couldn't care less about educating their readers, at least if the prerequisite of that is having a basic familiarity with the subject they are covering. Instead, all journalists care about are the "bounds of the DC debate", not stupid boring messy things like facts or scientific inquiry. No, those get in the way of "catastrophically misguided" right-wing policies that Democrats supported, dammit! Better to have a purely insult-based foreign policy discussion, completely void of theory or substance....

I would be surprised if Yglesias could outline more than one or two "scholarly controversies" in IR in any detail, much less describe how foreign policy has no interaction with those arguments. Bush 43's entire foreign policy was based on a mutation of democratic peace theory, which is hotly contested in the academy and elsewhere. Clinton's foreign policy was the largest experiment in neoliberal institutionalism that the world has ever seen, and it too was vehemently debated in the scholarly circles, and still is. The whole Cold War was practically a petri dish for IR theory. In all cases American foreign policy was engineered in part or full by IR scholars. What on earth is Yglesias waiting for?

In other words, it's just not true that scholarly debates have nothing to say about political controversies, or that they are "too far off the center of American political consensus". Every foreign policy decision that governments make has been discussed and analyzed, however imperfectly, by IR scholars and has been adopted or denied by politicians and ideologues. Yglesias just hasn't done his homework. Which is sad, because "homework" in this case basically entails e-mailing Drezner. Or even me.

Boys, boys!!  Everyone in a neutral corner please!! 

There are a few things to unpack here.  In essence, I have to take issue with all of these excerpts.  Part of the problem is that the panel that inspired this whole discussion in the first place was dominated by people who blog/write/care a hell of a lot more about American politics than world politics.    Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but it's dangerous to tease out implications from such a group. 

As someone who has consumed and interacted with foreign affairs journalists from time to time, here are my observations: 

1)  The big mismatch between American journalists and IR academics is that when journalists are writing about international relations, they're likely focusing on a single event or episode -- a crisis with China, a disaster in Pakistan, sanctions against Iran, etc.  International relations scholars, on the other hand, tend to think in more abstract terms that involve multiple observations:  great power relations, humanitarian disasters, or sanctions episodes.  Because journalists are far more interested in the particulars of individual narratives, however, the skill set does not always match up.  Journalists writing about a particular case are understandably not fond of stating the average probability of policy success in a generic class of events.  Doing so eliminates the particularities and idiosyncracies of the individual event -- i.e., the very value-added provided by the journalist. 

This doesn't mean that IR scholars are completely ignored -- I find I get calls/queries when journalists are writing their "news analysis" pieces that take stock of a particular policy.  It does mean that our research is not likely to appear in the first wave of stories about an event, however -- and that wave has a way of framing the subsequent narrative.

2)  To be honest, I suspect that this state of affairs bothers IR scholars all that much, for two reasons.  First, as I suggested at the panel (and Yglesias blogged), there are a lot of professional reasons why political scientists don't want their work to break through to the public sphere.  Second, good IR scholars care less about access to journalists because they have better access to the actors they really care about -- the policymakers themselves.  There is a decent amount of interaction between mid-ranking officials and IR academics, and those channels can influence policy a lot more than talking to journalists.  Of course, this contributes to gaps between public opinion and foreign policy elites, but that's been going on for many a decade already. 

3)  To be honest, I'm not sure what Yglesias is talking about with respect to IR scholarship and political partisanship.  It might be that the IR paradigms don't map neatly onto political cleavages.  Realist and liberal approaches can be found in the mainstream of both party's foreign policy communities.  More broadly, rational choice thinking is shot through the foreign policy mainstream.  There are some schools of thought -- constructivism, feminism, etc. -- that might be thought of as outside the mainstream.  On the other hand, these approaches aren't exactly mainstreamed within the scholarly community either. 

Scholars who advocate policy positions out of favor with the current administratio n have opportunities to exercise their voice, through op-eds, congressional testimony, etc.  Once they've done that, political journalists can find them to get critical quotes, etc. 

4)  Drezner to Yglesias:  please call Winecoff before calling me.  My cup, it runneth over right now. 

Am I missing anything? 

Both the Guardian and the New York Times have stories today suggesting that the Sino-American relationship is on the mend.  Last night Barack Obama and Hu Jintao spoke on the phone for, like, a whole hour.  It was such a good chat that Air Force One sat on the tarmac at Andrew Air Force base for ten minutes so Obama could finish the call. 

There has been an appreciable shift in the past week.  Hu pledged to attend the Obama's nuclear proliferation summit a few weeks from now.  U.S. oficials sound confident that China is on board for another round of United Nations sanctions against Iran -- though the  negotiations for that could take a while.  It also appears that China has not followed through on sanctions against U.S. companies for arms sales to Taiwan.  On the American side, at a minimum, the Treasury Department has deferred submitting its report to Congress on Chinese currency manipulation practices for a little while.  The headline for this Vikas Bajaj story suggests that Hu's visit "may signal easing by China on currency," though there's no actual evidence in the story backing up that asserrtion. 

So, no new Cold War then?  The Financial Times' Gideon Rachman urges readers to ignore the ephemeral and pay attention to structural factors:

1) Economic tensions. Tim Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, has just publicly expressed his concern about the very high levels of US unemployment and many American economists, including in the administration, blame America’s problems in large part on “Chinese mercantalism”. If the Chinese refuse to let the RMB appreciate, or even allow only a modest appreciation, then a clash will eventually happen.

2) Climate change: Remember Copenhagen? There is no sign that the two nations are going to move any closer on this most divisive issue.

3) Iran - A new pacakge of sanctions could head this one off. But they are unlikely to be strong enough to satisfy the US or - let us not forget - to achieve their objective.

4) The mega-trend in the background is the rise of China and the relative decline of the US - and the expression of this will be the gradual challenge to American military hegemony in the Pacific. This will not be a comfortable process.

So look beyond today’s headlines. I can assure you, the Chinese do.

Well..... let's think about this for a second.  The first three issues are all about more than the bilateral Sino-American relationship.  On the economic front, there's evidence that China has ticked off other countries beyond the United States.  On Iran, the U.S. was careful to line up support on sanctions from the Britain, France and Russia, leaving China as the sole P-5 holdout.  And on climate change, at a minimum, China came out of Copenhagen looking like something of a bully. 

My take of the past six months is that the Chinese overplayed their hand very badly across an array of issues, irking not just the United States but other significant countries.  In response, the U.S. has been able to exploit multilateral resentment as a way of teaching Beijing about the security dilemma putting subtle pressure on China to moderate its tone and actions.  As for the mega-trend, well, that's happening, but it's still quite a ways off. 

Rachman still makes some decent points.  There are fundamental conflicts of interest.  Going beyond the issues Rachman mentions, there's also minor stuff like the fact that China and America's domestic regimes look a wee bit different. 

For now, however, much of China's recent bluster turned out to be self-defeating.  What will be interesting to see is how both Washington and Beijing will learn from the recent spot of unpleasantness. 

UPDATE:  Hmm.... this Financial Times story by Jamil Anderlini and Alan Beattie is very interesting: 

Beijing may adjust its policy of pegging its currency to the dollar provided a visit this month by Chinese President Hu Jintao to Washington goes smoothly, according to a top adviser to China’s central bank.

Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua university and a member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee, said as long as the US respected China’s “core interests” the currency disagreement could be easily solved.

Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart talked for an hour on Thursday evening, during which Mr Hu stressed that the “proper handling of Taiwan and Tibet” was the biggest factor in Sino-US ties, according to China’s state media.

“As long as this is understood, everything else will be easy to handle and we will find the key to unlock the exchange rate problem,” Mr Li told the Financial Times.

Developing....

Over at Politico, Laura Rozen posts about the subtle efforts by the United States to moderate the United Nations Human Rights Council's behavior. These efforts have yielded... well, let's see what Rozen's got: 

“We have started to shake things up,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Suzanne Nossel told POLITICO, although she added, change is “incremental and slower than we would like.”

For the last eleven years, the UN human rights body has run a resolution that bans defamation of religion. The resolution is aimed at preventing the publication of for instance the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that enraged many in the Muslim world.

The resolution, opposed by advocates of freedom of expression, passed again last week at the Geneva body, but this time by its smallest margin ever, with 20 countries voting for the resolution, 17 against, and with 8 abstentions.

"It is encouraging that more states are starting to stand up against initiatives that threaten to undermine human rights," Human Rights Watch’s Julie de Rivero said. "Countries such as Zambia and Argentina that voted against the ‘defamation of religions' resolution are demonstrating positive leadership at the Human Rights Council."

The U.S. has been trying to push member countries instead towards an alternative resolution that would counter racial and religious intolerance, such as Switzerland’s minaret ban, while protecting freedom of speech.

“We achieved a consensus resolution that halted efforts towards a binding treaty that would infringe on freedom of speech," Nossel said, explaining that it was a neutral procedural resolution, with no language about banning defamation or new binding protocols.

That, plus a new U.S.-backed resolution on human rights in Guinea following the September 2009 massacre and stronger resolutions on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma and North Korea mark what Nossel described as accomplishments on the long road toward the U.S.’s objective of turning the Council into a more credible and effective force on behalf of human rights globally.

Hmmm... in terms of measuring progress, I think I would translate Nossel's "incremental and slower than we would like" to mean "slower than continental drift" in plain English. 

My point here is not to suggest that Nossel and her compatriots are doing a bad job -- far from it. They have made some inroads into the so-ridiculous-it's-easy-to-lampoon-it nature of the Human Rights Council. 

But these are ridiculously small inroads, and extremely difficult to sell politically. Rozen's a sympathetic reporter on this issue, but the intrinsic silliness of the Human Rights Council remains largely undisturbed after reading this story. The Obama administration's engagement strategy with the institution have yielded nonzero but meager returns. 

A politically sustainable strategy of patient multilateralism requires the occasional tangible success to point to by its boosters. I doubt the Human Rights Council will be producing any of those deliverables anytime soon. 

I can't believe I watched the whole thing -- the 2010 Academy Awards show made Avatar seem tightly paced.  Seriously, the show went downhill the moment Neil Patrick Harris left the stage. To be fair, there were no real surprises among the actual winners, draining any suspense from the proceedings.

Of course, this is a Foreign Policy blog -- so are there any lessons that can be drawn about world politics from such a pop culture phenomenon?  Actually, yes: 

1)  Clearly, security studies trumps international political economy when it comes to the Academy Awards.  I noted yesterday that Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds were all about war and resistance.  Those films received ten academy awards.  The only nominated film that addressed IPE was Up in The Air, and it got shut out. 

2)  That said, the awards also suggest that in Hollywood, Thucydides' dictum that "the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must" does not entirely hold.  Despite being the highest grossing picture in history, Avatar got clobbered by The Hurt Locker. So much for financial power translating into prestige. That said, I'm pretty sure Kathryn Bigelow could take James Cameron in a fight, so maybe there was a different kind of power at work here. 

3)  Hey, that was some hard-core bargaining going on between Disney and Cablevision as the awards show was beginning. 

4)  The person with the greatest amount of "soft power" in Hollywood?  Tina Fey. The woman could be paired with an eggplant and she'd get the eggplant some laughs.   

5)  Clearly, the Academy Awards has problems dealing with asymmetric threats. How else do you explain a three-minute homage to horror films in which the entire zombie genre gets less than a second of screen time??!!! Hello?!  Chucky from Child's Play got a longer shot, for crying out loud! 

Fools -- they clearly haven't thought this through. I mean, based on the John Hughes tribute, Judd Nelson is already a member of the living dead. 

One final thought:  if there was any justice in the world, the Best Visual Effects Oscar would have been a tie between Demi Moore and Michelle Pfeiffer. In general, I found a rough but direct correlation between age and fashion sense. The older the actress, the more chic they looked. 

Post your own thoughts in the comments.

As promised, it's time for the 2009 Albies -- the best writing on the global political economy this past year.  My focus was on accessible work that focused on the here and now as opposed to more ahistorical, theoretical efforts (which is the norm in my little corner of the academic universe). 

Given the convulsions of the past year, there was a bounty of good material -- I couldn't condense this list down to just five articles.  So, instead, below are the ten articles and arguments that I couldn't shake.

In chronological order of their appearance: 

1.  Michael Mastanduno, "System Maker and Privilege Taker: U.S. Power and the International Political Economy," World Politics, January 2009.  A concise and prescient explanation for why this crisis is different from the crises of the past sixty years.  Mastanduno's primary reason:  the U.S. doesn't have the same ability to deflect and displace the costs of adjustment that it did in the past.  A concise explanation for how state power affects the contours of the global political economy. 

2.  Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market, Harper Collins.  Fox traces the intellectual arc of the efficient markets hypothesis, and shows how it evolved into a caricature of itself by the time the 2008 financial crisis hit. 

3.  Mathew J. Burrows and Jennifer Harris, "Revisiting the Future:  Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis," The Washington Quarterly, April 2009.  Some of the primary authotrs of the National Intelligence Council's 2025 report offers an addendum to consider how the 2008 financial crisis will affect long term strategic trends. 

4.  Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic, May 2009.  Johnson's argument is pretty simple -- politicians in the United States are acting under the powerrful influence of the financial sector.  This argument is derivative of past work (see Jeffry Frieden, Charles Lindblom, and some guy named Karl), but Johnson still packs a powerful gut punch.  The comparison between the U.S. now and the financial wrecks bailed out by the IMF is disturbing.  I'm not convinced by Johnson's argument -- but I can't shake it either. 

5.  Stephen Roach, "Manchurian Paradox," The National Interest, May/June 2009.  In many ways, this is the Chinese doppelgänger to Johnson's essay on the United States.  Roach explains quite clearly how the leadership in Beijing is refusing to acknowledge that it's growth model is not sustainable, and the costs to the global economy of those failures of recognition.  Michael Pettis, Eswar Prasad, and Martin Wolf have also made this argument -- but Roach's essay is accessible to all. 

6.  Joshua Kurlantzick, "The World is Bumpy," The New Republic, July 15, 2009.  A well-researched essay on the ways in which the Great Recession has triggered "de-globalization" -- and the costs that this has exacted on those small developing countries that have staked the most on global economic openness.

7.  Barry Eichengreen, "The Dollar Dilemma," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2009.  During a moment when anxiety about the dollar's status as a reserve currency was at its peak, Eichengreen was able to explain precisely why the dollar is going to be around for quite some time. 

8.  Clive Cookson, Gillian Tett and Chris Cook, "Organic Mechanics," Financial Times, November 26, 2009.  If efficient market approaches fail to explain the boom/bust nature of financial markets, trhen what can?  This article doesn't provide a definitive answer, but it does explore the ways in which economic thought might prosper if it borrowed from a science other than physics. 

9.  Jason Reitman, "Up in the Air," Paramount, December 2009.  Maybe this is cheating -- Up in the Air is a work of fiction, not a nonfiction essay -- and it's an imperfect film at that.  However, the scenes in which the protagonists visit the places where they have to engage in mass layoffs is quite affecting.  For me, there was a simple five-second shot of an office floor that demonstrated the dramatic contraction some firms have encountered in the post-bubble era.  Those five seconds are a far more graphic way of explaining the past year in the economy than anything else I've seen. 

10.  Mark Lynas, "How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room," The Guardian, December 22, 2009.  I'm not sure what to make of Lynas' account of how China scuppered a more ambitious cimate change deal at Copenhagen.  I suspect it's the truth but not the whole truth.  What's interesting about this essay, however, is the ways in which it suggests China's strategy of lying low and maintaining developing country solidarity on matters of global economic governance is not going to work any more. 

OK, dear readers, did I miss anything important? 

So, how should you interpret the first round of P5 +1 negotiations with Iran that took place yesterday? 

The hard-working staff here at drezner.foreignpolicy.com would never want its readers to view material outside their ideological comfort zone -- that would be crazy talk.  Therefore, please go down this list of different ideological approaches to Iran and read only the one that fits you. 

Liberal internationalism:  An excellent first round of talks.  At a minimum, the Iranian pledge to permit IAEA inspectors into its Qom facility, and the agreement to have fuel encriched outside of Iran, help to lessen fears of a breakout capability.  This shows how a multilateral approach, linked to the threat of sanctions, can successfully bring Iran into a cooperative relationship with the West.

Neoconservatism:  These talks were a feckless and futile exercise.  Iran agreed "in principle" -- which means that it will likely not honor its pledges. This also covers part of the uranium that we know about, and only the facilities that we know about.  Anyone who thinks that this lying, odious, anti-Semitic regime is showing all of its cards on the nuclear question is deluding themselves.  The only thing these talks will accomplish is sapping the will of Americans to use any means necessary to overthrow the regime. 

Realism:  Iran's concessions reinforce the point that this regime a perfectly rational actor that is worthy of even deeper engagement.  We still have no evidence that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, so we should not go looking for red herrings that do not exist.  A deal can be made with this government once we are able to ignore how its rulers treats its own citizenry.  Any failure from here on in is entirely the fault of Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States. 

So, did I miss anything? 

Two interesting articles of note over the weekend.  The first is Clive Thompson's essay on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (otherwise known as BDM) and his Fabulous Foreign Policy Game Theory Contraption forecasting model-for-hire.  Bruce is the leading proselytizer of using game theory as a predictive tool in political science -- and he has quite the forecasting business to back him up. 

Bruce seems to merit one of these every two years or so, and Thompson hits most of the same sources and critics of BDM's approach.  He does add this nugget of information, however: 

Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. The computer’s advantage over humans is its ability to spy unseen coalitions, but this works only when the relative positions of each player are described accurately in the first place. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Bueno de Mesquita notes. Bueno de Mesquita begins each interview by sitting quietly — “in a slightly closed-up manner,” as [U.K. telecommunications company Cable and Wireless Richard] Lapthorne told me — but as soon as an interviewee expresses doubt or contradicts himself, Bueno de Mesquita instantly asks for clarification.

“His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”

Patrick Appel links to this essay because of BDM's Iran predictions (according to him, the student protestors will be more powerful than Khamenei by the fall).  He notes, "Let's hope his model is right, but I'm skeptical that these questions can be predicted by equations alone."  Except as the above quote suggests, it's not just equations alone -- it's knowing what values to plug into those equations.  This requires a different set of skills -- and rare is the person who excels at both. 

Speaking of brain skills, I found Emily Yoffe's Slate essay on brain chemistry to be kind of interesting.  The argument in a nutshell:

Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix....

[O]ur brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," [University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent] Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one....

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. [Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak] Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

I fully recognize the biochemical reward system discussed in the essay, and I've certainly heard this argument applied to bloggers who allegedly lose the ability to engage in long-form writing.  But based on my own experience, I don't buy it. 

True, blogging, updating, etc. brings excitement.  But I get the same thrill from perfecting a longer stretch of prose.  When I'm polishing up a case study or trying to refine a theoretical argument, I usually feel the desires for new information that I get when I'm blogging.  Indeed, the biggest mental rush I get from writing is tackling a completely new subject and then, 10,000 words later, retackling the first draft with renewed vigor and the promise of molding it into something better.  Once I think I have something of merit, oooh, does the dopamine kick in.

But that's just me.  Tell me, dear readers -- are your electronic gadgets hampering you ability to do long-form work?     

CLOSING SCENE OF "THE SECURITY COUNCIL CLUB":

INT. SECURITY COUNCIL CHAMBER - DAY -- we see the U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL enter the Security Council room and pick up an essay. 

CHINA (voice-over)

Dear Mr. Secretary-General, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in Security Council session for whatever international problem that we failed to address.  But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care?

You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.

But what we found out is that each one of us is an economic engine...

 UNITED STATES (voice-over)
...and a military power...

 RUSSIA (voice-over)
 ...and a basket case...

 EUROPEAN UNION (voice-over)
 ...and a princess...

  IRAN (voice-over)
  ...and a rogue state...

 CHINA (voice-over)
     Does that answer your question?
       Sincerely yours, the Security Council Club.

     We see SUSAN RICE walking across the football field
     as she thrusts her fist into the air in a silent cheer
     and freezes there.

Fade to....

So I'm back from my week off.  Did I miss anything?  Let's see: 

1. Coup in central American country;
2. North Korea acts provocatively
3. Iran's regime ramps up its paranoia
4. Republican governors gone wild
5. The Washington Post commits an odd blunder. 

In other words, a typical week in 2009. 

Actually, that's not fair to Central America -- thankfully, coups there are much rarer than they used to be. 

Earlier this week Facebook VP of Global Communications, Marketing, and Public Policy Elliott Schrage gave an interview to cfr.org that's worth reading.  As you would expect, Schrage was pretty upbeat about the use of social networking technologies as a means for political action: 

So, do I see Facebook as being an incredibly valuable tool for public diplomacy? Absolutely.

Some of the most interesting uses of Facebook have been for the purpose of social action, which is essentially political action, whether it's an extraordinary rallying of support by the Colombian community around the world to protest the terrorist activities of FARC-the Colombian militants-or whether it's students protesting bank fees and bank charges in Great Britain, or whether it's the Obama presidential campaign generating almost six million supporters on Facebook as a means of communicating his policies, his positions, and his campaign activities....

Frankly speaking, some of our greater successes are in countries where the means of distributing information have not been easy or without friction. So, for example, in Colombia we have remarkable market penetration. In Indonesia we have among our fastest-growing market share. Chile, I believe we have close to 50 percent of the online population now on Facebook. In Europe we're doing extremely well. And in the Middle East we've achieved very interesting degrees of penetration, and in fact just recently announced that we are launching right-to-left languages in addition to left-to-right languages.

There's an obvious PR element to Schrage's spiel, but then again, let's wander over to the Financial Times' Najmeh Bozorgmehr on how Facebook is being used in Iran's presidential elections: 

As they struggle to compete against an Iranian president who enjoys the support of a powerful state apparatus, leading candidates in June’s election are resorting to Facebook to spread their messages....

“We are using new technologies because they have the capacity to be multiplied by people themselves who can forward Bluetooth, e-mails and text messages and invite more supporters on Facebook,” said Behzad Mortazavi, who is in charge of Mr Moussavi’s campaign committee.

He said the wireless technology of Bluetooth would be used “extensively” to send out speeches and photo slideshows. The supporters of Mr Moussavi have opened about 20 Facebook pages calling on others to vote for him and have attracted about 7,500 members so far.

Although Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponents on Facebook are not yet campaigning against his re-election, their posts may help strengthen the anti-incumbent mood among the elite.

A page called “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad” has so far attracted more than 35,000 members, the highest number in all pages related to the president.

Yeah, the thing about that Facebook page is: 

• 35,000 is still pretty small;
• The site has been up for 18 months as an experiment to see of Ahmadinejad is lss popular that George W. Bush.  So far, the numbers don't bear this out;
• The site is administered by someone from Sweden;
• I'm willing to bet that not everyone who's joined is registered to vote in Iran (they all do seem to be quite attractive, however).

Question to readers:  is the power of social networking real or exaggerated in "countries where the means of distributing information have not been easy or without friction"?

In FP's sister publication Slate, Fred Kaplan critiques Steve Walt's list of top ten international relations films, as well as my own ("neither of them gives our own film critic, Dana Stevens—or, for that matter, Gene Shalit—the slightest cause for worry.")  In an act of sheer bravado, Kaplan then goes on to list 25 other films that he thinks are better than any of either Walt's film or mine. 

To which I say -- oh, it is so on now, Kaplan!!  You want to throw down on films?  Let's throw down!! 

[Wouldn't this have been a more succinct reply?--ed.  Yeah, I was going for more Jack Nicholson-crazy voice, but that works, sure.]

First of all, what act of hubris could make Kaplan claim that any film on his top-25 list is better than Dr. Strangelove?  It's like making a top ten best film list and consciously omitting Citizen Kane.  There's no point to it except sheer bloody-mindedness.  Dr. Strangelove captures all of the absurdities of the Cold War in one neat package ("Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!").  I didn't elaborate on that point in my original post for the same reason the world doesn't need another essay extolling Orson Welles' masterpiece -- it's an exercise in redundance. 

Second, Kaplan reacts to my fave flick, The Lion in Winter, as follows: "Um, OK: a strange choice, especially for the top of the list, but there's a daring quality about it."  This leads me to wonder if Kaplan has actually seen the film (and, full disclosure, I haven't seen some of the films on Kaplan's list, such as The Lives of Others.  From what I've heard, many of these films would likely have been on my list had I seen them.  To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, however, you make top ten lists with the films you've seen, not the films you wish you've seen).  This is a movie about a powerful but aging leader desperate to ensure that the gains his country has achieved under his rule persist after he is gone.  To do this, he has to outwit a foreign leader and plenty of domestic (in both senses of the word) adversaries.  This movie is filled with strategizing, backroom dealing, bluffing, backstabbing, balacing, bandwagoning, and an waful lot of shouting.  In other words, a typical day in world politics. 

Third, and more interesting, is defining what makes a movie a movie about international relations.  Kaplan nitpicks at Wag the Dog because "it's more about domestic politics than international affairs."  He similarly picks on Seven Days in May because it "isn't really about international politics."  Part of studying global affairs, however, is investigating the interplay between domestic politics and and international relations.  Wag the Dog is about how domestic difficulties can translate into foreign policy escapades (or staged foreign policy escapades).  Seven Days in May is clearly about civil-military relations, but on an abstract level it's about the difficulties of implementing international agreements over the resistance of powerful domestic interests. 

Now, all this said, I can't deny the quality of some of Kaplan's selections.  The moment I posted my list, I started kicking myself because I forgot about The Godfather.  It really is the perfect metaphor about international relations -- alternating levels of tension and calm punctuated by occasional bouts of violence. 

As for Kaplan's other films, Goodbye, Lenin! is also an inspired choice.  Thirteen Days is less inspired -- I could never get past Kevin Costner's atrocious accent.  On the other hand, I do have a soft spot for 1974's The Missiles of October. 

Finally, a few other films that got omitted from all of our lists but merit further conversation: 

1.  A Fish Called Wanda (1988):  One could argue that the Anglo-American alliance was the most significant relationship for much of the twentieth century.  This film, on the cultural differences that exist within the special relationship, is worth multiple viewings.  In a perfect world, watch this with a mix of Americans and Brits -- they laugh at different parts. 

2.  Traffic (2000):  The debilitating effects of drugs -- and the drug war -- on both sides of the Rio Grande makes for interesting viewing.  Plus, there's a terrific Salma Hayek cameo. 

3.  Henry V (1944) and Henry V (1989):  Alex Massie makes a good point here:  "the Olivier and Branagh versions remind one that an individual text may be subject to more than one interpretation. Plus, of course, there's an awful lot of Just War theorising to be done on the back of Henry V."

David Brooks' column today looks at the lessons that the swine flu outbreak have for the future of global governance: 

So how do we deal with [transnational problems]? Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states?

A couple of years ago, G. John Ikenberry of Princeton wrote a superb paper making the case for the centralized response. He argued that America should help build a series of multinational institutions to address global problems. The great powers should construct an “infrastructure of international cooperation ... creating shared capacities to respond to a wide variety of contingencies.”

If you apply that logic to the swine flu, you could say that the world should beef up the World Health Organization to give it the power to analyze the spread of the disease, decide when and where quarantines are necessary and organize a single global response....

The response to swine flu suggests that a decentralized approach is best. This crisis is only days old, yet we’ve already seen a bottom-up, highly aggressive response....

If the response were coordinated by a global agency, those local officials would not be so empowered. Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero. The institution would have to poll its members, negotiate internal differences and proceed, as all multinationals do, at the pace of the most recalcitrant stragglers.

Second, the decentralized approach is more credible. It is a fact of human nature that in times of crisis, people like to feel protected by one of their own. They will only trust people who share their historical experience, who understand their cultural assumptions about disease and the threat of outsiders and who have the legitimacy to make brutal choices. If some authority is going to restrict freedom, it should be somebody elected by the people, not a stranger.

Finally, the decentralized approach has coped reasonably well with uncertainty. It is clear from the response, so far, that there is an informal network of scientists who have met over the years and come to certain shared understandings about things like quarantining and rates of infection. It is also clear that there is a ton they don’t understand.

A single global response would produce a uniform approach. A decentralized response fosters experimentation.

Reading this, my first thought was, "wait a minute... Brooks' characterization of Ikenberry's poition ("Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero.") doesn't sound like Ikenberry's stuff. 

If you look at the Ikenberry paper that Brooks cites, he proposes, "a strategy in which the United States leads the way in the creation and operation of a loose rule-based international order. The United States provides public goods and solves global collection action problems (emphasis added)."  That doesn't sound terribly centralized to me.  Indeed, my hunch would be that Ikenberry would find centralized and decentralized responses to complement rather than substitute for each other. 

Don't trust me on this, however.  I asked John Ikenberry this morning what he thought about Brooks' argument.  Here's his response in full: 

The problem with David’s analysis is that he thinks the two strategies – national and international – are alternatives. We need both. National governments need to strengthen their capacities to monitor and respond. International capacities – at least the sorts that I propose – are meant to reinforce and assist national governments. This international capacity is particularly important in cases where nations have weak capacities to respond on their own or where coordinated action is the only way to tackle the threat. When it comes to transnational threats like health pandemics everyone everywhere is vulnerable to the weakest link (i.e. weakest nation) in the system, and so no nation can be left behind.

This is not a new idea – it is the idea that underlay America’s strategy of order building after WWII. Jacob Viner, a leading international economist of that era, captured the logic in 1942 as it relates to global markets: "There is wide agreement today that major depressions, mass unemployment, are social evils, and that it is the obligation of governments. . . to prevent them." Moreover, he said, there is "wide agreement also that it is extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, for any country to cope alone with the problems of cyclical booms and depressions. . . while there is good prospect that with international cooperation. . . the problem of the business cycle and of mass unemployment can be largely solved." What Viner says about economic cooperation in the 1940s is even more the case for the diffuse, shifting, and uncertain threats of our era. States need collective capacities to they can make good on their own national obligations to respond.

[You've been dreaming of this kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan moment for a while, haven't you?--ed.  Yes.  Yes I have.]

UPDATE:  Anne Applebaum offers a more focused critique of the World Health Organization -- and its critics -- in her column today. 

Clive Crook wants to know what the Obama Doctrine will be in foreign policy: 

In domestic policy, an organising principle directs the innovation. Mr Obama wants to shove the US in the direction of a more social democratic – Americans say “progressive” – social contract, with universal healthcare and a tax and benefits system much more attuned to reducing inequality. Whether this is wise, feasible or what the country even wants is questionable, but the connecting theme is clear.

Is any such theme emerging in foreign policy? Can one begin to talk of an “Obama doctrine”?

(Let's skip the question of whether Crook's answer on the domestic front is correct {click here for an interesting take on that question}). 

Foreign policy doctrines often emerge after the fact -- i.e., someone looks at foreign policy decisions/actions and suggess a pattern or philosophy that tie everything together in one neat cognitive package. 

Looking at what Obama has done to date, I'd suggest that his foreign policy doctrine comes by way of Montesquieu -- crudely put, useless conflicts weaken necessary conflicts. 

To elaborate:  the United States suffers from an overextension of its foreign policy obligations.  With a weakened economy and a drop in U.S. standing, it is both costly and fruitless for the administration to continue policy conflicts that yield little beyond pleasing those invested in the policy status quo.

It looks like Obama and his foreign policy team have prioritized what issues they think are important -- righting the global economic ship, China, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, nuclear nonproliferation come to mind.  Those are the issues where the United States will stick to its preferred policy positions and be willing to accept no deal rather than a bad deal. 

One other issues -- Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, trade policy, human rights, democratization, missile defense -- Obama's team sees little to be gained from continuing past policies that have borne little fruit.  Furthermore, by adjusting U.S. policy on these issues, the administration conserves resources, goodwill and focus for the first list of issues. 

Question to readers:  does this seem like an appropriate description?  If it is, do you agree with it?  Or is it just too soon to tell? 

Your humble blogger has learned that, in an amazing reversal of fortune, the leaders of the G-20 have heeded President Obama's call to embrace a "responsiblity to co-ordinate our action and find our common ground."  The result will be a communique that actually addresses the current crisis on concrete terms. 

Recognizing the need for a "grand bargain," French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel pledged to offer a combined $400 billion in fiscal stimulus in return for a United States agreement to allow for enhanced regulation of large financial institutions.  China agreed to match U.S. and European commitments to the International Monetary Fund, in return for a doubling of its voting quota within the Fund.  Furthermore, all parties agreed on their joint responsibility in unwinding the macroeconomic imbalances that contributed to the current crisis, thereby pleasing Martin Wolf to no end. 

The G-20 leaders summit will have an immediate follow-up of a meeting of the G-20 trade negotiators, with the stated intent of completing the Doha round before the end of the year.  The Obama administration, in line with attempts to reduce the budget deficit, have taken the first concrete step, pledging to slash agricultural subsidies by more than 80% over the next four years. 

In related news, France and the United Kingdom agreed to relinquish their Security Council seats in return for an "EU" seat, paving the way for Japan, India and Brazil to join as permanent members, creating a new "P-7" in the Security Council. 

These breakthroughs were achieved on the same day that a mysterious chemical attack was unleashed in Washington DC that rendered Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, James Carville, Paul Begala and Bill Bennett permanently and irrevocably mute.